Git on OS X 10.5

What?

Git on OS X 10.5 Leopard.

Why?

Git is YARC (yet another revision control system) with some outstanding differences. You can find out for yourself just what those are, but as a hint git is written by Linus Torvalds who hates CVS and SVN - "a bad idea and its bad fix walking hand in hand."

So what does git have going for it?

• Distributed repositories - you don't need to rely on a central host
• Branching made easy - in the same spirit, code branches is a breeze
• Speed - it's just that much faster
  

How?

So you want it - now how do you get it?

Thanks Wincent.com for the seamless installation script. Just copy the text, paste it into the terminal, and stick around to watch it all happen (and type your password at sudo time.

More configuration scripts are also available, as well as an introductory tutorial.

# build expat dependency
curl -O http://surfnet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/expat/expat-2.0.1.tar.gz
tar xzvf expat-2.0.1.tar.gz
cd expat-2.0.1
./configure
make
make check
sudo make install
cd ..

# build GPG for signature verification
curl -O ftp://ftp.gnupg.org/gcrypt/gnupg/gnupg-1.4.7.tar.bz2
openssl sha1 gnupg-1.4.7.tar.bz2
tar xjvf gnupg-1.4.7.tar.bz2
cd gnupg-1.4.7
./configure
make
make check
sudo make install
cd ..

# copy GPG files from Tiger install
mkdir -m 700 ~/.gnupg
cp ${PATH_TO_TIGER_HOME_FOLDER}/.gnupg/*gpg* ~/.gnupg/

# git
curl -O http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-1.5.2.4.tar.bz2 \
  -O http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-1.5.2.4.tar.bz2.sign
gpg --verify git-1.5.2.4.tar.bz2.sign git-1.5.2.4.tar.bz2
tar xjvf git-1.5.2.4.tar.bz2
cd git-1.5.2.4
make prefix=/usr/local all
make prefix=/usr/local test
echo $?
sudo make prefix=/usr/local install
cd ..

# manpages
curl -O  http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-manpages-1.5.2.4.tar.bz2 \
  -O http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-manpages-1.5.2.4.tar.bz2.sign
gpg --verify git-manpages-1.5.2.4.tar.bz2.sign git-manpages-1.5.2.4.tar.bz2
sudo tar xjv -C /usr/local/share/man -f git-manpages-1.5.2.4.tar.bz2

Bill Gates cooks up plan to have UoC students switch to Vista.

Today Bill Gates came to speak on our campus. Access was restricted through a ticket lottery. Effectively, 99% of interested students and the rest of the world were left with the option of viewing a recording of the talk online.

Note the wmv file format. Also note that, when played on a mac (with or without Flip4Mac), it has no sound.

When I tried to download it for conversion, it gave me this:















My guess is it only plays on Vista, and this was all a scheme from Mr. Gates to get us to "up-grade" (get it?). Kind of like how the only way to get people to use MS Office 2007 is to force them, because, guess what - it's broken.

Review - Open Source PDF Editors

What?

There are plenty of good PDF viewers out there. Combined with the format's platform independence, it makes PDF a great format for presentation.

However, I've never gotten my hands on a good open source PDF editor.

So I took the time to look around a bit. Here's what I found:

• PDFEdit - free and open source. I couldn't get it to compile on OS X. Here's an article pointing out all its flaws, and still hailing it. That's how bad we need a good open source PDF editor.
• ReportLab Toolkit - a "mature PDF library." In fact, so mature that it took me 10 minutes of mature fighting with it before I maturely gave up trying to get its demo to work.
  
• PDFCreator - Windows only... However, my guess goes against some Microsoft groupie randomly cracking this nut.
• Skim - The only somewhat promising alternative.
  

Still no winner. If someone has one, let me know. In the meantime, check out my quick Skim review (it's worth the skim).

Vista not playing well with IPv6

"Microsoft acknowledges some 'compatibility issues,' but calls operating system its best ever"

In the meantime, vista machines are unable to send printer data over IPv6 without corrupting the data. That's quite a compatibility issue alright, when IPv6 is supposed to solve the looming IP shortage within years.

Common Microsoft™ *RTFM*! Or in this case: Read The F***** Specs.